It's Plastic

So here's a typical steel brushguard. Ideal for ploughing through thickets and hedgerows as they jump out in front of one's offroad vehicle while tooling around downtown Madison.


And here is a similar vehicle sporting a plastic brushguard. Does anybody know what this is good for? Running down artificial christmas trees? Pushing through plastic snow fencing? What? Why? How? Evolution or devolution?

Q2 2007 Report

Well, I'm back, so this might be a good time to put out a report. Here's the scoop on April 1 to June 30:

Cycling:
1612 total miles

I don't have a detailed breakdown, but something like 400 on the Woodpecker, 300 on the Trucker, 150 on my Trek 400 roadie and the balance on Xtracycles and whatnot. The weather has been just about perfect most days, and I've only been rained on twice (and lucked out about 5 times...)

Hoping to do a solo tour into the Driftless Area about the middle of July.


Gardening:

This has been going rather well. I've almost completed the Master Gardener program through our county extension office.

Much of the work I did bringing compost into the garden last fall paid off this season. Pretty healthy, as you can see. The bad news is that I'll have to move out of this plot because the city wants to put a street in its current location. I have another spot picked out and have begun to work on it for next season.

Given a little more notice, I could have planned a bigger garden at my parents' house out in the country. I'll be better prepared next year. I'm also thinking about trying to start a couple of permaculture guilds there. We'll see.

I've also completed the course work, but not the volunteer time, for the county extension's Master Composter program. Believe me, there's no title I want more. I've also got quite the composting operation going, but that's a topic for another post.

Resolutions:
I posted a list of resolutions in the Q1 Report,where they were listed and reviewed. I won't re-hash all of them here, but here are a few worth mentioning:

2. Retrofit your home for energy conservation. The insulation projects I mentioned in April won't happen until late summer or early fall, but I think we may also add more insulation to the attic. In fact, I've been considering removing most of the stuff stored up there and piling on a lot of insulation. Another suggestion I might try is to remove the current attic access door (it's a trap panel in the ceiling) and replace it with a panel screwed in place and caulked, with insulation piled on top. We're not keeping anything of any importance up there and the energy savings might well be worth the trouble.

Also, the new fridge seems to be drawing less electricity. We're still getting by on no air conditioning and with no dishwasher. Yes, we're roughing it.

3. Cut back on your gasoline consumption. Between January 1 and June 30, we've put just over 3,000 miles on our car. We're on track to cut back significantly on our usual 11,000 miles for a normal year, in no small part because the Missus has committed to cycling, bussing or walking for almost every trip under 4 miles. Hooray for the Missus!

4. Plant an organic vegetable garden. I planted 3, which may well qualify me for freakdom.

5. Compost your food waste. Mine, my family's, waste from a local coffee shop and chicken poo from some city chickens. More in a future post.

Not much on the other resolutions for now. I made a list of topics for future posts today, so stand by for more...

Where the hell am I?

Oh, here I am. Many apologies to the faithful few—second quarter's been a busy one.

I'll try to answer the accumulated questions in order:

1. The Amsterdam is great, and my wife and I both love it. There haven't been any fights over it yet, but that time could come. I had a front wheel built with a Sturmey-Archer X-FDD drum brake dynohub. I'll write the review as soon as I get a light hooked up again (the stock light went away in favor of a basket) but for now we're enjoying the good life with brakes on both wheels.

2. Yes, I've been planting stuff, some of it sneezy but most of it not. I currently have 3 gardens, a yard full of perennials and a bunch of container plants. Oh, and I'm working on becoming a master gardener and master composter volunteer. And I'm volunteering at the community garden. More than my thumb has turned green.

Here's the community garden in mid-April:


From the same spot today:


And from another angle today:



This space is 20 feet square and contains 2 kinds of cabbage, broccoli, peas, garlic, 2 kinds of onions (red and yellow), swiss chard, beets, turnips, radishes, lettuce (which immediately went to seed when it got hot), corn, tomatoes, tomatillias, parsnips, carrots, edamame, 3 kinds of green beans, summer squash and spaghetti squash. I grow da herb too, mon: borage, dill fennel, lovage, parsley and cilantro. Plus a couple of daylillies, a hollyhock, poppies, lupines, sunflowers, coneflowers and vetch.

I have a garden at my folks' house in the country too, with more onions, beans and corn, plus black-eyed peas, acorn squash, watermelon, Noir des Carmes melons strawberries and buckwheat (mmmmmmm...pancakes.)

I'm growing some lettuce and a few tomatoes at home.

Here's my pickup bike in gardening action:


Cabbage plants seeded on January 15 (ready for planting back on April 15):


Hard to believe these are about 2 feet across now (in the foreground of the photo above):




3. Nope, no more snow. See?

Before:


After:


(Same street, different blocks.)

4. Therefore, it is no longer winter in 'Sconsin, it's our only other season—Road Construction:


Madison's West Beltline is being resurfaced. Makes me glad I ride. Taken from the Southwest bike path bridge at Hammersley Road.


Pacific Cycle's World Headquarters, background left. That's where all those Schwinns, GTs and Mongeese come from.

April in 'Sconsin

Don't put away your parkas, kids! We got over 5 inches of snow yesterday, which was a record for April 11. I didn't ride, owing to a broken chain on the Moose and a sneaking suspicion that a fair number of drivers might have forgotten how to pilot their vehicles safely in the interval since our last snowfall. This followed an unusually cold fortnight of temperatures averaging 20f degrees below normal. I'm pretty sure the beets and turnips I planted near the end of march are dead. The peas are probably fine. Our Master Gardener class was cancelled last night.


And then there's the newest member of the fleet, my wife's new Electra Amsterdam. It's been a little too cold or snowy to ride it, but she really loves it and I think it'll get lots of use. I'm pretty sure it will get a Sturmey-Archer dynamo drum brake front hub installed in the front wheel pretty soon here. A brighter halogen light or maybe an Inoled will be in order too, along with a basket. It came with a good taillight though. I'll give it a little write-up and some better photos here in a bit.

Q1 2007 Report

Some of the cool kids blog monthly, weekly or even daily updates. I'm not that ambitious, so I'm going to try quarterly, starting with January 1 to March 31.

Cycling:
614 Total Miles

Broken out to: 345 on the Woodpecker, 150 on the Moose, 75 on the Trucker and the balance on a couple of other bikes. February was brutally cold and nasty, but January and March made up for it by being relatively cooperative weather-wise. The last two weeks of March were rainy enough to wash most of the grit off of the streets.

Gardening:

I've gotten a bunch of cabbage family plants off to a pretty good start indoors. Lettuce, basil, dill, tomatoes and tomatillias are not too far behind. Had a couple of nice warm days just over a week ago and took the opportunity to drop some peas, vetch, radish and carrot seeds in the ground. Five cauliflower plants from last summer survived several sub-zero weeks in February in the bosom of my humble cold frame:



Began taking a Master Gardener class back in mid-February, and am set to take a Master Composter class later in April. Pretty interesting so far. I've also volunteered to be a plot monitor at my community garden and begin a composting project in cooperation with a local coffee shop.

Resolutions
I've also been working on a few New Year's resolutions (!) I've borrowed from John Michael Greer. I thought it might be fun to follow a well-defined list, and this one struck me as likable and achievable. Here's the progress:

1. Replace your incandescent light bulbs with compact fluorescents. Mostly done. We won't be converting completely, and some of the replacement will be done through attrition. CF bulbs don't like to be cycled (turned on and off) a lot, so we're going with lower-voltage incandescents for places where the lights aren't needed for long periods of time and get cycled a lot. I was also concerned about the fact that CFs use mercury until someone pointed out the mercury that coal-fired power plants spew would be reduced by using CFs.

2. Retrofit your home for energy conservation. Two insulation projects are on the schedule for early this summer—attic and foundation. Built a small cellar-like cold room in the basement for storing certain produce. Just bought a new refrigerator that will consume about a third the electricity of our current unit.

3. Cut back on your gasoline consumption. Feh. Story of my life.

4. Plant an organic vegetable garden. Been doing this for 3 years. Added the MG classes this year.

5. Compost your food waste. Been doing this for at least 8 years. Now I'm into getting other people to do it.

6. Take up a handicraft. Does snowshoveling count?

7. Adopt an “obsolete” technology. Been working on my hand tool restoration skills. Working with someone from the community garden to rehab hand tools discarded by a local landscaping company.

8. Take charge of your own health care. Not so much yet.

9. Help build your local community. Community garden and Bicycle Federation volunteer activities. Trying to think of more.

10. Explore your spirituality. Still sort of an inactive Baha'i. Do like JMG's writing quite a bit and bought the Druidry Handbook, but haven't read too much of it yet. Finally have the wife talked into taking the youngin' to some UU gatherings (both dislike conventional Christianity quite a bit.)

So, there it is. See you in July (maybe).

Spread the Word

It's about time bike commuters were offered parity in the tax code. Here's an article in Bicycling about Congressman Earl Blumenauer's effort to create tax inscentives for bicycle commuters.

With over 50 percent of the working population commuting 5 miles or less to work, bicycles offer the strongest potential for reducing single-occupancy vehicles.

Tax breaks wouldn't create a shift all by themselves, but it would be a step in the right direction.

The Bicycling article includes links to Congressman Blumenauer's website and a tool from the League of American Bicyclists that automatically generates a letter to your local representatives (their link is wrong, but the one here is correct.)

Hint, hint.

Faustian Bargaining

The very concept of "energy independence" for America, parroted by liberals and conservatives alike, amounts to utter delusion. There is not, and will never be, even a rough equivalent to fossil fuels when it comes to powering industrial society in its current form.

So far, the most harmful and immoral manifestation of this delusion is the belief that biofuels and biomass will allow us to continue our journey as it is outlined on the Perpetual Growth itinerary. Developing a biofuel infrastructure to replace our current oil infrastructure would be the equivalent to inviting your car to the dinner table. John Michael Greer offers the best argument I've seen that this is tantamount to sticking your hand in a monkey trap.

A Clever Big Dummy

Todd from Clever Cycles has posted some pics of thier new Big Dummy build over on Flickr. Pretty exciting stuff.

The Surly blog sez "these monsters should be in stores around August of this year. Thanks for being patient."

You're welcome, even though it's really hard to be patient...

Velocipedal Hillbilly

It occurs to me that the old homestead has recently taken on a certain resemblance to the local dump, only with more bicycles. Hmmm, and maybe a little bit like the local trailer park too...


Here we see the one working vehicle parked right alongside one of the less functional. That black Schwinn has a set of 650B wheels I'd like to try on a little Miyata I got at a police auction, which turned out to have a useless set of 597 wheels. And that'd be a bathroom sink right underneath it. Got the Wald basket and the tires on a little curbside shopping expedition.


Then there's the Schwinn that we pulled out of the river last fall. With a canoe. With 3 people in it. That's a story for another post. Meanwhile, it leaned against the pear tree all winter, cuz, what else am I going to do with it? That's a rusty cookie tin on the ground next to it.



And here's where the missus and I set to enjoy the kinetic art that the youngin' made. The loop of metalized dryer vent normally serves as a tire for one of the wheels on the sculpture. Good times.



Finally, the icing on the cake: a bike on blocks.

This, gentle reader, is how neighborhood organizations are born.

Sprummer

Sprummer has arrived here in Madison. Three weeks ago, we had 20-some inches of snow on the ground:


Today, we have temps in the mid-70's and absolutely no snow:


So, there you go.